Teeth Whitening Using Lights

Teeth whitening using lights has a long and varied history. Beaming White only offers blue LED teeth whitening lights because they are the safest, longest-lasting, and least expensive of all teeth whitening lamps. Below we explain the differences between the different types of teeth whitening machines in case you are interested, but you can see our complete lineup of bleaching lights here. Our best-selling teeth whitening accelerator light is the Futura 2400.

Types of Teeth Whitening Lights

Blue LED

As the name suggests, these lamps consist of blue LEDs that range in power from fractions of a watt to a few watts. They emit a cold blue light, which is why they are so safe. The light cannot burn the skin or gums. The wavelength is typically in the range of 430-490 nanometers. This wavelength activates different chemical compounds including but not limited to hydrogen peroxide. The best bleaching agent for teeth is hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) teeth whitening gel. Because blue LED light activates H2O2 gel so well, and blue LED light is so safe, it is no wonder that today most bleaching lights in the teeth whitening industry are of this type.

Plasma

Plasma lights are excellent for teeth whitening because they are very powerful, but they are also very expensive. They have other dental uses, namely curing composites quickly and effectively. However, few dentists have one. For teeth whitening, they are definitely overkill unless your dental practice will use it frequently for other procedures, but they are out of the question for non-dentists. They typically have power in the neighborhood of 150W.

Laser

When we say laser, we mean a real dental laser light. These are usually used for drilling or cutting into the teeth if the laser is a strong one, or they are used for performing certain dental procedures, usually surgical in nature, on the soft tissue in the mouth, most commonly the gums or gingivae.

In the past, these lasers could remove pigment out of the tooth by destroying the pigment without using gel. However, that was found to be unsafe. Today, the few dentists that use an actual laser will actually use the same whitening gels that are used with blue LED lights. The big drawback of using a laser to whiten teeth is that it fires a narrow beam, so the dentist needs hold it in front of each tooth and move it very carefully from tooth to tooth, so it’s really not a good choice from a profit perspective for the dentist.

UV

Ultraviolet light was found to activate hydrogen peroxide gel, in other words, to make it react faster, so UV teeth whitening lights became the norm for a few years in the industry. The problem with UV light is that it’s harmful to human beings. Even if the dentist could cover up the outside of the mouth, the inside of the mouth was exposed, especially the part of the gums that was not protected with a gingival barrier. For this reason, as soon as it was found that blue LED light activates hydrogen peroxide bleaching gel just as well as UV light, most manufacturers switched to making blue LED teeth whitening lights, which is where the industry is at today. Blue LED light has a very similar wavelength to UV light.

Halogen

Zoom from Discus Dental, and a few other teeth whitening lamp distributors, used halogen bulbs as their light source. The problem with this is that these lights are very powerful and get very hot. Therefore, they could easily burn the skin or other tissues so dentists needed to protect the mouth from getting burned. When they realized that UV or cold blue LED light activated the gel just as well or better, most stopped using this technology in their teeth whitening lights.